You must log in or register to comment.
“I feel like criticizing today.”
“You’ve been criticizing all week Dave, someone has to shovel the cow shit.”
Just be French, criticizing becomes part of everything
Ce que tu dis est complètement faux.
If a society is to function people need to be doing the work that isn’t enjoyable as well as the work that’s enjoyable.
There’s likely not enough people that get genuine enjoyment out of being a garbage man or sewer maintenance worker for a world with everyone doing what they want to work.
You have to add incentives for the less desirable labour or else the system collapses under its own weight.
The USSR gave early retirement to those that worked undesirable jobs, pretty decent incentive. Having undesirable jobs doesn’t make Communism collapse.
Having undesirable jobs doesn’t make Communism collapse.
True, but it does show that the OP is just bullshit propaganda.
They didnt need to make their comment to show that lmao, Its very clearly Marxist Propaganda, the best kind of Propaganda.
The solution capitalism gives us is that those jobs pay less. Any able-bodied person can clean toilets, so supply and demand results in little pay for cleaning toilets. However, those same people deserve a basic human life with food, shelter, and companionship, yet they are easily priced out of this. The “incentive” you speak of is the threat of starvation.
Communism actually recognizes this. Everyone pitches in to get the basic, necessary work done. This tends to be a lot less than generally expected. Most people today are not doing work that is necessary at all.
In my home town a sanitation worker makes double the provincial minimum wage and gets benefits. That’s an incentive for a job that has a low barrier to entry but undesirable labour.
The benefit of this system is that you can in fact choose this role instead of being assigned it based on the requirements of society. If the compensation isn’t tempting enough then the employer will increase the compensation until it makes sense. That’s how it’s supposed to work at the very least.
If the current implementation isn’t working then you address the issues with the implementation, you don’t tear it all down and try something completely different.
That’s nice. Does it work out that way for jobs with low barriers to entry across the board in your experience?
Depending on the desirability of the work compared to the compensation yes it seems to be working pretty well
Depending on . . .
So not depending on if this is a human being who deserves basic food and shelter.
If you’re incapable of working then you take advantage of the social safety nets that your government or community provides.
I never said I was against having supports in place for those who are unable to work?
I’m saying that your support is irrelevant. If you tried to be put them into place, you would be fought by extremely powerful interests. This is the only possible way capitalism could be moral, we’ve tried to do it, and it’s not happening.
That’s why we look to throw that system away.
Which in America, is fuck all, and the biggest capitalists have actively stopped them from being instituted. The same people who benefit a lot from having a workforce that is cheap and easily replaceable.
I have doubts.
Many communities in the USA don’t have garbage people. Everyone takes their garbage to the dump. There are people that work at the dump.
Someone does have to build and fix sewers, but no one has to clean another person’s toilet.
Also, no one only does pleasurable work, regardless of the economic system.
Everyone takes their garbage to the dump
What’s the carbon footprint on that?
Low. Electric street cars and all electric is wind and solar.
Im starting to think marx may have been adhd
From a report from an anonymous German spy
"Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk. Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world. "
He just like me fr
It’s funny how that imaginary Chad Stalin quote implies that you can’t do any of that stuff under capitalism, or that capitalism requires any person to be limited to “one sphere of activity.” In the USA we do have the freedom to choose to do any or all of that, and our only limitations towards doing them all are time and resources.
Lots of people have to work 40+ hours just to survive, that doesn’t leave much energy to do things other than your paid job. And you can’t just switch jobs willy nilly, pretty soon nobody would hire you anymore if your cv is full of jobs you’ve only held for a few weeks or months
deleted by creator
Who runs a communist society? The people? Do we all take turns being president? What happens if it’s a bad dude’s turn and they don’t want to relinquish power?
No one said communism and limits on the government/a constitution are mutually exclusive (If your communist society even has a government, which technically they aren’t supposed to, not that I’ve seen any details on how that is supposed to work).
There is no law that says you can’t switch jobs whenever you want. We literally do have the freedom to do that within the framework of capitalism and the laws that govern the citizens of the USA. The reality of the situation is of course that employers generally don’t like that, but employers are not the government and they don’t own us. We still have our freedom to choose to pursue whatever we want for employment. These are generally good features of capitalist democracy - it’s also good that employers are free not to choose unreliable candidates.
You have the freedom, if you have money. Otherwise you don’t. You just have the freedom to be homeless and starve
That is generally how it works in most of the world, except for primitive hunter-gatherer societies that live beyond modern civilization.
Except that most countries do have social services to support the needy. If you are poor in the USA, you can get free food and free healthcare from local county governments.
Sooo… how does that relate to your point? That you can supposedly do what op is saying in America because freedom?
It’s a reply to your comment, it says what it means already and needs no further explanation.
Right limited time and resources. You get more time and resources by earning more, quicker. You typically do that by becoming more skilled. You do THAT by… Specializing in one sphere of activity.
You absolutely can do whatever you want in a capitalist society, but let’s not pretend there’s no incentive to stick in one lane and specialize.
That’s just kind of how labor intrinsically works though. It’s not a capitalist thing.
No, it’s how specialization works. True, as you do one thing more, you get better at it. This inherently disincentivizes jumping around and learning multiple skills, if we tie that to earning ability within capitalism. This does not have to be how we assign value, or earning, however. We could do any number of things differently, to incentivize different things.
One radical idea just off the top of my head would be pegging earning to age. Specialists get to specialize if they love a particular thing, and it won’t hurt their earnings. Jack of all trades still finds earnings more aligned to their actual worth to society - flexibility. Right now, being an okay person at everything is pretty crappily rewarded, because you only earn more by doing something REALLY well.
Again, this is just off the top of my head. I don’t think it’s necessarily the way to reorganize earnings in our society. It’s just an example of how labor doesn’t necessarily intrinsically have to lead to specialization earning more.
But society already values flexibility as well. As a basic example, I was hired in my current job in large part because I have a relatively broad range of skills within my field, rather than being hyper-specialized in one particular thing. Sure, in an abstract world where replacing employees is frictionless and firms are all megacorps with tens of thousands of employees (or more), tremendous specialization would probably be more commonplace. But in our real world, companies value flexible employees who can respond to changing projects, requirements, conditions, etc., because just firing and hiring a new specialist costs times and money, and many companies (startups especially) can’t afford having thousands of specialists in every niche they touch upon.
Further, even specialists have to communicate and collaborate with other specialists, and they need to be able to understand each other well enough to do so. If you wanted to build robotics to pick tomatoes automatically, for instance, it would be ridiculous to hire one tomato farmer and one roboticist who know nothing about each other’s respective specializations. If neither has any flexibility or breadth of knowledge, it will be very difficult for them to communicate and collaborate to get the project working.
A reminder - or possibly just some information - because I see this misconception so often. You can have money in communist or anarchist societies. You can reward shitty jobs, or even all jobs with money to be used for luxuries! This does not go against the principles of these social systems, despite what people often imagine. You may not have individuals racking up huge amounts of assets in the form of business empires, but you as an individual can still, idk, do work and use the output of that work to buy beer or whatever.
That is not to say that everyone will agree that these societies should have that… But just consider this before you make the “what about the sewage workers” argument.
I mean if you redefine communism, sure. But a communist society as described by Marx is moneyless, classless and with not central government. Because if all your needs are met and resources shared amongst the commune, what purpose would money serve?
People redefine capitalism every time it suits the rich folk, why can’t we redefine communism too?
If you ever play ‘communism has never been tried,’ based on a rigid definition, then no.
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand your response, we can’t redefine communism if you play the “communism has never been tried” card based on a rigid definition?
Is someone saying that? I don’t think I am.
…are you?
I’m so confused.
It sounds like you’ve got it but don’t want it.
Yes, linguistic descriptivism is fine… unless you engage in linguistic prescriptivism on the same subject.
Yes, you can redefine communism… so long as you’re not one of those people whose defense of communism heavily involves a particular definition of communism.
If that’s not you, personally - great. You know how a conditional statement works.
That seems somewhat tautological then, but okay. I’m not here to judge.
More pointing out a sadly commonplace contradiction.
Communism is by definition moneyless
But yes anarchy is less prescriptive
Personally though I’m sceptical that money can be without hierarchy, or that the distinction between necessities and luxuries is all that meaningful, since it’s all very relative
Sorry, I’m making my own classic blunder and using communism when I mean Socialism.
Motte and bailey.
People talking shit about communism are obviously referring to the several countries which were allegedly headed that direction, and - for some reason! - super didn’t get there.
Defending the apparently-nonexistant utopian ideal is not a meaningful response to even the shittiest and least-informed criticism of those very real countries and their very real problems. It’s like if conservative dipshits tried arguing that capitalism is only when perfectly rational consumers have unlimited information, so “capitalism has never been tried.” It’s a stupid dodge. You know what words are used to mean.
Those are just hobbies.
Can you walk into a l law office and be a lawyer one day, then a scientist the next?
(note: no, sovereign citizens, you are not either of these things despite what YouTube tells you)
Who the fuck would need a lawyer?
Even a communist utopia needs to have laws
People being sued, people accused of crimes, people seeking redress from others?
Same as now?
You’re completely missing the point of the meme.
It’s not saying you can just roll a dice and pick a random highly skilled job every day.
View it as this person’s responsibility is to get food. So he can fish if he wants to or hunt or raise animals, farm, forage etc. Anything that brings food for the commune. (And like anyone can and should be a critic)
If he got tired of that he could change responsibilities entirely, depending on how labour is distributed in the commune. If he wants to be a lawyer he will have to study law, and if he wants to become a scientist he will have to study a scientific field too.
But how does this scale? Because everyone is going to want a few jobs, and nobody is going to want to do the crappy chore jobs. Anyone with roommates will have had a conflict over messes, how is that different than a commune at a smaller scale?
I really don’t mean this in a dismissive way, but it’d be better if you just read a book on communist theory. Because I cab give you a summery of 1 of the possible solutions but without further context it will just generate more questions.
But if you don’t want that summary: people that work less desirable jobs get more benefits like early retirement or priority for certain luxury goods or something like that, but would ultimately have to be decided on by the community at large.
You could make the menial jobs age based - ie the younger take that mantel until they’re of age.
Or make everyone take part in it.
Either way would probably be a great way to clean the place up, supercharge recycling and axe planned obsolescence FAST
leftist meme
leftist meme
how dare you call uncle charlie a lefty? he’s a commie for people’s sake!
Cool. I’ll fly a plane in the morning, perform open heart surgery in the afternoon and do economic forecasting in the evening.
Don’t need much to do economic forecast
Yeah, but doing it well is pretty difficult. You can also just cut some guy open and hope for the best.
Oh yeah lemme just rear cattle. Not like it’s a job that requires specific skill to be good at. Also, who’s gonna make the equipment to do those things?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That’s such a good encapsulation lol
Rearing cattle in the evening eh?
That’s no way to talk about yer partner if you ask me
I am making my own blunder there and referring to the idea of the “communist state”, I suppose closer to what we understand as socialism, rather than the idealistic communist society which, like you say, is moneyless (and stateless, which immediately separates it from say the USSR or whatever).
Yeah, but that’s the problem. Communism sort of relies on that communist state transition period. Or at least, that’s where every single communist state has turned into a dictatorship. The party-in-the-meantime never gives up their power “after a communist utopia sprouts.” That’s really the main leftist communism critique.
Socialists, communists, anarchists all have very similar ideas of a socialist utopia. But it’s how we get there where we all differ. Anarchism is communism minus the ruling party while relying on people to be good, self sustain, and fight back together when under attack. It would be great if we could have some left unity, but….well, ask the FAI how that went.
Oh ok
